In research published in âProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,â scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) describe how liquid metals crystalize under immense pressure. In 1879, Nobel-prize winning chemist Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald discovered that liquids often first freeze into temporary, unstable structures before changing into their final, most stable equilibrium phase. This so-call âOstwald step ruleâ has been a fundamental mechanism for the study and synthesis of new materials and is a textbook principle that all physicists learn in school...